The SRC Presents Mireille Miller-Young: The Black Erotic Archive

Date/Time
Date(s) - 25/11/20194:30 PM - 6:30 PM

Join the Sexual Representation Collection at the Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies for its annual speaker series, featuring Mireille Miller-Young for a public lecture on The Black Erotic Archive.

The Black Erotic Archive, is an image-based project that explores black erotic photography, film, and ephemera from the late nineteenth to late twentieth centuries. Over nearly two decades, Dr. Miller-Young has uncovered a wealth of images that will finally be brought to light. From 8mm stag films made by small time pornographers in Harlem during the Depression to amateur-photographers in the 1970s, these images form an archive-not-yet-made, exposing how, even as sexuality remains a site of expropriation and trauma, black people also use sexual images to present themselves in ways that displayed complex subjectivities, desires, and labors. Because no central repository of black sexual cultural production exists, we must ask: what does it mean to archive and curate black sex?

Mireille Miller-Young, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Feminist Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara and the 2019-2020 Advancing Equity Through Research Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She researches and teaches about race, gender, and sexuality in popular and porn cultures, and the sex industries. Her book, A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography (Duke University Press, 2014) was awarded the Sara A. Whaley Prize for Best Book on Women and Labor by the National Women’s Studies Association and the John Hope Franklin Prize for Best Book by the American Studies Association. Dr. Miller-Young has published in numerous anthologies, academic journals, and news outlets including Porn Archives, Queer Sex Work, Sexualities, Meridians, The New York Times, Ms., The Washington Post, Coming Out Like a Porn Star, and $pread, a sex worker magazine. With Constance Penley, Celine Parreñas Shimizu, and Tristan Taormino, she is an editor of The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (The Feminist Press, 2013), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBT Anthology and has been translated into German (2014) and Spanish (2016). She is also lead editor of the recently published Black Sexual Economies: Race and Sex in a Culture of Capital. She is currently at work on three projects: Ho: Hustling, Hypersexuality, and the Erotics of Race; The Black Erotic Archive; and The Sex Worker Oral History Project.

For the graduate student seminar, students should RSVP to p.keilty@utoronto.ca. When: November 25 at 10:30am – 12:30pmWhere: 2 Sussex Ave, Innis 223